Furthermore, none of the alternatives appear to maintain daily backups of bookmarks so that if you realize today that sometime in the past three weeks you had inadvertently deleted (or lost due to a browser glitch) an entire folder of important bookmarks that you don't check often, you can go back three weeks and restore from an old backup. This feature saved my ass at least once.

The classic password guessing in the 80s was the one character at a time system as seen on War Games. We're damned fortunate not to have password authentication systems that work like the old "Mastermind" game.

In the 80s my high school BASIC programming teacher (TRS-80 Model IIIs) made us go through the trouble of structuring our programs very much as if we were coding in Pascal or some other more structured language. At the time I didn't fully appreciate the added burden and limitations that were being imposed on us. Understand, though, that I was a self-taught Commodore 64 BASIC spaghetti coder complete with a generous spattering of GOTOs and not nearly enough GOSUBs. Certainly these programs would have been a nightmare to diagram. That (at the time) unwelcome discipline imposed in that high school class was of immeasurable value later on as this was an excellent prep for other languages later on and for building far better code than if I were to have continued through life trying to code as if I were still on that C-64. Still, I can't help thinking that maybe Pascal would have been a more natural way of introducing that discipline and it leaves me wondering how many in other similar high school BASIC courses at the time weren't so lucky as to have structured approaches taught in connection with a totally not-structured language. But there's the flip side: Without that amazingly accessible C-64 BASIC that can literally be learned in no time with a quick read-through of the user manual and a handful of other peoples' code to pick through, I doubt I'd have ever bothered to learn in the first place.

You must be managing without the advanced features, or not using a spreadsheet. Try becoming proficient with Pivot Tables in Excel and then trying to do pretty much anything more than simply creating a Pivot Table in OpenOffice. Most of Excel's Pivot Table features are missing from OpenOffice. Likewise, Autofiltering is very crippled when you're using OO and you've become dependent on Excel's capability.

I can respect the monetary savings that can be had in using OO when one doesn't actually need the advanced features, but it isn't accurate at all to claim that OO is as capable or advanced as MS Office. Don't get me wrong, I don't think MS Office is a bargain at all. It is fucking expensive. This is a cost of doing business when you need those features. And if you do need those features, you can't get by with the free alternative. In that case, it isn't foolish at all to pay the extra money.